On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:04:46 +0100, K wrote:

alan.holmes writes
Each morning I go to the bottom of the garden to pick runner beans, and
often I cannot find any, then a couple of days later there are dozens of
them, huge and well past their best, so where have they been hiding, and how
can I be sure to find the damnned things before they get to the stage when
they are inedible?

If you shake the plants, the heavy beans have a different movement from
the leaves and are easier to spot.

I saw an idea on a gardening prog ages ago. A guy put his bean-canes
in quite wide apart, joined the tops of them with pieces of water-pipe
to make an arch, so that you can walk down the middle. The beans
largely hang down on the inside. I tried it one year. It needed some
work to get the canes to stay in the pipe. My pieces of pipe were too
large a diameter.

Pam in Bristol